Reckoning with the Imagination

Charles Altieri is one of our foremost literary/philosophical theorists and critics of poetry, and anything he writes commands attention. He is a master of these realms and a fine-tuned reader in the disciplines he knows so well. Reckoning with the Imagination is a rigorous and impressive book. -David Mikics, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English, University of Houston, author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age Charles Altieri has long been our most philosophical, and yet most impassioned, critic and theorist of poetry, for whom lyric poems are heroic 'acts of mind' that criticize illusion and empower the reader 'to will what the intellect sees,' while yet marrying this activity to 'lively affective intensities.' In this new book, he shows, with the assistance of Wittgenstein, how notions like imagination, feeling, attunement, and appreciation can be given a viable, post-Romantic sense adequate to the fullness of the experience of poetry. -Henry Staten, University of Washington Charles Altieri has written a book about the social uses of literature that doesn't foreclose the power of aesthetic engagements to transfigure particular lives, especially with respect to possibilities of self-understanding that mere sociality cannot confer and, even more importantly, with respect to the sensuous intensities that society cannot harness. Altieri restores to our investments in the aesthetic a power of appreciation for human worldliness that has long been absent from literary criticism-to the detriment of literature and life. -Alan Singer, author of The Self-Deceiving Muse: Notice and Knowledge in the Work of Art